Surfing in the birds and the swarm

Back out in the water to refuel the energy that drives whatever makes me work. At first it was cool. There were quite a few waves. So the small ones kept the people inside catching whatever and clearing out the area, and by the time I score a set wave, I was able to get some clean rides all the way through without a hassle, One was primo. I was paddling like hell to get into it, and didn’t look like I was going to make it, Then a huge spray and spray in my face and I couldn’t see for a second or two and was in the wave. Had no idea if someone was coming down the other way, but bolted up and was into a nice chest-high peeler. Then the wave started backing off, and I realized I was a little too far back on the tail and walked up to the nose to drop into the wall again, and then the board dropped and I scrambled back to the tail and made a tyurn to shoot right into as trim past a guy who was frantically paddling to drop into the wave ahead of me. NOT! And I was gone and took it all the way until it got a little sloppy with backwash.

Then the waves stopped, and there wer enough. Then three familair morons paddled out with these floppy green hats–that’s almost like a warning sign, the floppy hats. And because they’re soulless idiots they know each other. I started seeing familiar weasels. They wetre already paddling and negotiating every time a set came in, Then the glamour girls came out. These women in bright wetsuits, doing their taste-me-look-at-me dance across the waves. The worst. And gradually the surf spot becomes a goon pond. Thius aimless shifting mass of limited ambition and thwarted lives trying to resolve itslef by taking whatever they can from the people around them in the name of competition or their on private bar graph of personal growth. Well, puke with arms and legs is what is.

ANd here they come, the parents with their Costco boards, and a knapsack beach chair followed by their children, And then the instructors with their little classes and foam boards. And then some school, that has turned the ocean into a latch-key program. Throwing tones of little kids into the beach break without any respect for the people at the break. Again the template of the world, with their sense of rights and privleges they claim in the name of taking it away from others who they say have no right to it (As long as they outnumber you.). And so with he classes, these schools, it creates the goon soup of a free-for-all.

So when you only think of the crowds and not the waves. It’s time to go in. I finally got a wave, and someone took off behind me after I got iut. I never turned around to look at them. I just rode in on the last wave, didn;t look behind me, and left,

Atop there was a goon teacher with a cliopboard, and credit card slips, getting paid by his student for taking him out in the water and shoving him into the swarm.

Hal was sitting up top. He has surfed this place for well over thrity, possibly forty years and said, “I said something to someone and I proabbly shouldn’t. I was on a wave and he burned me. I shouted at him, ‘Hey.” But he kept going.”

“A guy with a lid on a blue board?”

Hal nodded.

“Yeah, an asshole, he’s always scamming.”

“I said to him, after the wave was done, ‘You’re rude.’ He goes ‘What?’ ‘Ypu took off in front of me and ruined =my wave.’ ‘I didn’t see you or hear you.’ ‘I shouted at you.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and then he just paddles back out. They need a crowd to hide in. They don’t care. It’s what they can get.”‘

Hal shook his head and said, “None of these people will ever know what this place was.”

“They know what they’re doing, it’s how they get everything in life. It just works betetr in a crowd.”

I looked out in the ocean. A flock of pelicans and sheerwaters were feating and diving on sardines in the water, slaughtering them.

I looked out at the people on their foam boards in the water and thought, there’s no difference between them and those birds, they slaughter and feasting on the surf spot.

I escaped before they could take a bite out of me.

Eating and eating and taking and taking, no wonder they get heartburn–it’s the closest they can get to having a heart.

I got a few at least, and left with a smile as they paddled and the bird dived for prey.